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He watched his wife handle the shiny chrome espresso machine like a pro.
To say Emma was particular about her coffee was an understatement. He never quite got it right. But he flipped a mean pancake. And those were Stella’s favorite.
Emma and her little crew had busted their butts to get the specialty batch of beans out for the Christmas season.De Ollahad stocked it at their café and their kiosks, and it flew off the shelves. Garrett had been lucky to reserve a few boxes before they sold out.
“Eat a whole one in case you don’t like your lunch today,” he told his daughter, pouring syrup on her pancake when she sat down to eat. If he let her do it, she’d empty half the jug onto her plate.
“Don’t tell her that.”
Emma kissed Stella on the forehead before handing him a steaming mug and going back to the machine to make her own. “You’re going to eat lunch in the cafeteria with all your new friends—I hear the food is really good.”
“I hope so,” Stella said primly, picking up her fork before attacking her pancake as if all the food in the world was disappearing. Garrett followed suit, with enough gusto that his wife muttered something about living with a pack ofwolverines.
“At least she’s not nervous about today,” he said around a mouthful of pancake. It was a shame the same couldn’t be said for him. Garrett was a ball of nerves.
Emma, predictably, was a rock.
After breakfast, they piled into the Range Rover and drove to Francis Perkins Elementary, the best private primary school in the county.
Stella was starting kindergarten, on the first day of the spring semester.
“You need to stop making that face,” Emma whispered to him as he climbed out of the SUV. “She’s not worried now, but if she sees how anxious you are, she’ll start panicking. You know she’s like a sponge.”
“I’m not anxious,” he protested.
“You’re sweating,” she said, surreptitiously wiping his brow with the lens-cleaning cloth she used for her sunglasses before making room for their daughter to walk between them.
Emma took Stella’s right hand and he took the other after helping her with her furry panda backpack, a gift Mariana had bought her at the zoo.
“I still think we should have waited,” he muttered over his daughter’s head. “She could have kept on with the tutor for another semester. There would be more new kids starting school. Right now, she’s the only one.”
“It’s going to be fine, Papa,” Stella said, having caught all of that with her sharp five-year-old ears. “I want to go to school.”
Melting completely, Garrett gave her a wan smile. “I know, baby. And you’re going to do great.”
“I am.” Stella beamed. “I love school!”
He chuckled. “She gets that from you,” he told Emma as they entered the main office to find out where Stella’s class was.
Letting her walk inside it took nearly everything he had.
“See,” Emma said, pointing through the window once their daughter had skipped inside. “She is already making friends.”
Scowling, Garrett approached the window, the tight knot in his gutloosening when he saw the teacher had taken his baby to her seat at a table with three other kids.
It had been less than a minute, but Stella was already chatting a mile a minute with the little girl seated to her right, a black-haired girl with an impressive braid.
He studied the elaborate coiffure with a critical eye. “We need to watch hairdo tutorials on YouTube.”
Emma laughed, taking his arm. “That’syour takeaway? Not that our beautiful baby is more than ready for school and already making friends?”
He grunted noncommittally, giving the other parents—some of them openly eyeballing them—a polite nod, but not engaging in conversation. Making other parent friends could wait, once he wasn’t a jumble of nerves and regret.
The bell rang. Emma waved at Stella one last time before dragging him to the front gate.
“You really have to loosen the apron strings,” she teased as they crossed the parking lot.
He gave the crowded hallway the side-eye. “There are more kids than I thought. What if she gets bullied?”